yes joan is awful and loch henry were good. overall I really enjoyed this season. but in my opinion netflix absolutely takes the piss whenever it acts all "uwu we're self aware look how creepy hegemonic, data hoarding streaming platforms and their overbearing tailored content are!! follow us on twitter for more quirky meta social commentary!!"
first ever netflix original series to prompt viewers to cancel their netflix subscriptions
Just hear me out, please.
I get a little frustrated when I hear someone (and that is a lot of people) say that Black Mirror is “a warning about the evils of technology,” especially when they say that Charlie Brooker is an anti-technology fanatic, because to me that completely ignores the message the show is trying to get across. And I may be overanalyzing it, but please take a second to think about the things you normally see in a Black Mirror episode.
Black Mirror is, primarily, a show about human nature and society. It uses technology as a tool to tell stories about people, relevant stories, which reflects how we live today. Not how it could be tomorrow, but how the world IS. Please be aware that from this point on, this is going to be pretty full of spoilers for more than one episode.
Take The Entire History of You, for example. It’s not yelling “LOOK AT WHAT TECHNOLOGY COULD DO, LOOK AT HOW IT COULD INVADE YOUR PRIVACY,” but rather asking, “if you could have this kind of technology, what would you do with it?” In this episode, our main character becomes completely obsessed with the idea that his wife might have cheated on him. So he spends literal hours overanalyzing footage of his memories to see any discrepancy in anything she might have said to him. It grows to a point where he physically assaults the guy he suspects his wife cheated on him with, and forces him to erase every memory he has of her. While this is happening, the victim’s girlfriend/fling calls the police and reports the assault, but because she doesn’t have a memory grain (the device which records an individual’s memories,) the police *hang up on her.* While she’s reporting a crime. Just because she doesn’t have a grain. They straight up ignore their duty to the law because the woman reporting a crime can’t record visual evidence.
In the end, the main character finds out that his wife was indeed cheating on him, and forces her to admit it. She does, and ends up leaving him. But they had an infant daughter (which might not even be his.) So he got the truth, but at what cost? He’s now alone, his daughter will have to grow up without a father. Who was more in the wrong here? She was obviously wrong to cheat on him, but did he take his obsession too far?
How about Hated in the Nation? In it, people are deliberately using a hashtag which they know will kill people, even as punishment for very minor mishaps. In the end, it’s revealed to be a plan to get every single person who ever used the hashtag killed, as the killer behind it all orchestrated it to get back at people who spew hate online to the point of making someone try to commit suicide. This is clearly a story about how people find it easy to throw around insults and death threats online, because when you’re online you stop seeing people as people and see them as an username. No face, no life, therefore my words have no consequences, right? On the other hand, isn’t it equally as petty and immoral to wish death upon someone who was cruel on the internet, no matter how cruel their words might have been? The message is clear: people on the internet forget that their words *do* have consequences, and become desensitized to their own awful words, words they wouldn’t dare say in public, to someone’s face. This creates more anger from the wounded party, and it turns into a vicious circle of hatred. As our main character Karin herself says, people on the internet rarely ever really mean what they say. But that doesn’t mean what they say won’t affect someone. At which point does it stop being “just the internet”? Where do we draw the line? This isn’t about the internet, it’s about how people use it, how they behave in it.
The list goes on. The National Anthem is about alienation, Be Right Back is about death and denial, Fifteen Million Merits is about consummerism and the media, Playtest is about being estranged from your family, San Junipero is about love and the idea of an afterlife, White Bear is about mob mentality, Archangel is about helicopter parenting, Nosedive is about our obsession with our image in social media, I could go on, and on, and on.
“Wow, Nosedive could happen in the near future!” No. Nosedive is *already happening.* Not in such a literal sense, of course, but Black Mirror is all about symbolism and exaggeration for the sake of metaphors. We live in an era where people pretend everything is happy and perfect all the time, where people take the same picture dozens of times to get the perfect one to post on Instagram or Facebook to keep pretending everything is flawless and joyful and beautiful every single day. Because if they don’t, they might disappoint their followers. If they vent about something, or admit they’re unhappy, or going through a rough time and they feel down and hopeless about it, a lot of people will criticize them for being a “killjoy.” This fake perfection on social media is something we live every single day. You either play along, or you are ostracized, isolated and thrown with the people who, like you, have grown tired of pretending. Or you ignore social media entirely, perhaps only checking in once ina while. Which in a way can be seen as isolating yourself.
You can criticize Black Mirror for its writing, or its pacing, for the story that an episode is telling. But criticizing it because it’s “trying to get people scared of technology and that’s stupid” is to miss the point by a thousand fucking miles in my opinion.
And honestly? The fact that people can watch something like White Bear or The National Anthem and come out of it thinking the point it was trying to get across is how technology is evil and dangerous, to me, says more about how blind we as a society are to our own shortcomings than words ever could. Because it shows that people can’t see these problems even when they’re shown to them crystal clear. It shows how in denial we are about the things we do wrong, because when someone writes a story around these things, we get a completely different idea from what it was trying so desperately to say.
And that saddens me.
lesbians and bi women need to start saying crazy shit when theyre horny like how people here talk about men. like less ”aaah i want to hold her hand…” more ”i want to explore her body like a tapeworm”
i actually don't think queer women should be weird about desire the way men are lol. i think a balance of being open about our sexual desire while still being respectful is possible actually
fuck off i want to engulf a woman like im a pitcher plant and shes a buzzing fly
gabbi when she hears eleanor taking her brother's side: messed up. disappointing. unattractive. 0/10 bye girl ✌️😔
gabbi when she finds out eleanor changed her identity, her face, her name, plotted revenge for several years, infiltrated the school, her brother's life, drugged their classmates, sent drea to the hospital, and got her brother expelled:
the more I think about it the more I realize that those little girls that are obsessed with dragons are just horse girls that wanted an animal less likely to injure them
"less likely" swept me to the floor
